97-Point Chardonnay Less Than $50 from the Legendary Stony Hill
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2024 Stony Hill "SHV" Napa Valley Chardonnay ($49.95) "This is one of the most compelling bottles of Chardonnay I’ve drunk in some time.” —Ryan Woodhouse, K&L Domestic Wine Buyer 
This is one of the most compelling bottles of Chardonnay I've drunk in some time. A laser-focused wine with incredible tension and reverberating minerality. The iconic Stony Hill property on Spring Mountain is now owned by Demeine Estates, which also owns the legendary Heitz Cellar and historic Haynes Vineyard in Coombsville. With this new Napa Valley-appellated bottling, winemaker Reid Griggs flexes his fruit-sourcing prowess, combining Chardonnay from Heitz's Quartz Creek Vineyard in Oak Knoll and Haynes Vineyard in Coombsville with a little Stony Hill Spring Mountain estate fruit to create something truly special. These world-class Chardonnay vineyards have been woven together seamlessly, each complementing the others perfectly. The style of the wine is very much in keeping with how Stony Hill has made its age-worthy Chardonnay for many decades. The wine has searing acidity, was not put through malolactic fermentation, and was aged with only a sparing use of new oak. It's linear, focused, and bristling with electric energy. In the glass it reveals struck flint, preserved lemon, crystalline white peach, ripe citrus, barley water, citrus oil, split white oak, and wet river stone. With time in the glass, the wine keeps opening up and gaining mid-palate texture and depth. So wonderfully layered and complex. This is amazing and so energized now as a young Chardonnay, but it's clearly a wine built to age for decades. If you love mature Chardonnay, forget a few bottles of this in your cellar for 15–20 years. I bet it will be spectacular. —Ryan Woodhouse, K&L Domestic Wine Buyer 
2024 Stony Hill "SHV" Napa Valley Chardonnay ($49.95) 97 points James Suckling: "This is a finely constructed chardonnay coming from two vineyard sources in Oak Knoll and Coombsville with only 30% malolactic conversion. Aromas of sliced citrus, wet stones, white flowers, iodine, beeswax, phosphorus and flint. The palate is fine-tuned with a textural, mid-weighted mouthfeel and a fine line of acidity that leads into a mineral, saline and nervy finish. Atypical for Napa and with only a little fruit from the famed Stony Hill vineyards in Spring Mountain, but a wine for the chardonnay tragic who chases reduction and nervy, racy styles. At $60, this is a gem. Drink or hold." 95 points Decanter: "The 2024 SHV Chardonnay uses fruit from Quartz Creek and Haynes vineyards, with blocked malolactic fermentation, and the result is aged 10 months in 30% new 300-liter and 500 litre barrels. The wine is really bright and energetic in 2024, with citrus fruit, apple orchard character, and toasty cedarwood notes. A crème brûlée character inches in, joined by reductive, flinty notes, with building tension on the medium- to full-bodied finish, ending with crisp lime notes balanced by orange oil."
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